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The Switzerland of America

East Tennessee, wrote a pamphleteer shortly after the end of the Civil War, had long been considered the Switzerland of America. “Its towering mountains locking up deep, rich and verdant valleys and coves, its succession of ridges and valleys, its magnificent forests, its roaring streams, the general fertility of the soil, the glory of the climate, the salubrity of the atmosphere, the sublimity, beauty and picturesqueness of the scenery, the freshness and voluptuous abundance of the country, all conspire to make it one of the most desirable spots in America.”

The two regions had more in common than just natural beauty. East Tennessee was fiercely independent and often contrarian in its political currents, especially during the Civil War. When Middle and West Tennessee citizens voted on June 8, 1861 to join the Confederacy, most East Tennessee voters rejected the call. It would remain a thorn in the eyes of the Confederate republic, and an enticing and romantic rallying cry for the Union—even though its complex views on race and the government would vex both contemporaries and historians for decades to come.

Library of CongressA view of wartime Knoxville, Tenn. from the cupola of the University of East Tennessee. CLICK TO ENLARGE

At the center of the Tennessee state flag sit three stars, representing the three geographic sections of the state – East, Middle and West. The division is more than just a cartographic feature: each region has its own economic foundation, social makeup, political traditions and culture rooted deeply in the state’s history. Once an extension of North Carolina, Tennessee received its first white arrivals in the 1760s. In violation of the 1763 Proclamation Line, which forbid white settlement beyond the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, early settlers established one of the earliest experiments in self-government under the self-described Watauga Association of 1771.

The British warned against this “dangerous” example, but after losing the 13 colonies the new state of North Carolina faced its own rebellion in its far-western reaches, with the ultramontane settlers proclaiming the new state of Franklin in 1784. The chaotic claims to separate statehood contributed significantly to the need for a new federal Constitution.

Closer to home, however, many settlers and land speculators simply bypassed the upper Tennessee River valley, by trekking through the Cumberland Gap and then sailing down the Cumberland River to the more fertile basin around what later became Nashville.

The state of Tennessee was born in 1796; so too was the rivalry between East and Middle (and later West) Tennessee. East Tennesseans quickly grew frustrated as economic and political power shifted to the Nashville area. The promise of a river-born empire based in Knoxville proved fleeting as the sucks and shoals downstream along the Tennessee River, which flows through Knoxville and eventually reaches the Ohio River, prevented boats from reaching the Mississippi River for most of the year. Knoxville, it became clear, would never be an American commercial and industrial powerhouse like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or St. Louis—though it soon became clear that Nashville, located on the more navigable Cumberland River, might one day be.

Finally in the early 1850s, after decades of frustration, population loss, and threats to create a separate state of East Tennessee, the region received state support for a new railroad connecting Knoxville to Virginia and Georgia, boosting its small but growing commercial class. Few East Tennesseans, however, lived close enough to the railroad – despite the support of the region’s mostly Whig voters for federally subsidized internal improvements – to capitalize on the growing market connections to the rest of the South. For the most part, the region remained defined by small farmers and communities, with few connections to, or sympathy with, the slaveholding economy of the Coastal and Lower South.

Meanwhile, the new cotton-based Mississippi River city of Memphis had begun to siphon what little political power East Tennessee still possessed. By 1860, Middle and West Tennessee were the dominant regions in state affairs, with cotton planters and traders around Memphis allying with slave-owning cereal producers around Nashville. A robust trade in goods to the Cotton Belt of Alabama and Mississippi – and slaves, traded on the Memphis levee by future Confederates like Nathan Bedford Forrest – cemented Middle and West Tennessee to the destiny of the Lower South.

Pulled in various directions, Tennessee faced the Civil War with fear and uncertainty. The state’s moment of decision came on June 8, 1861, when citizens across the Volunteer State cast their ballots in a referendum on separation from the federal government. Despite reticence over lost trade in the Ohio River market, and clear evidence of electoral fraud and violence, the Middle and West Tennessee counties voted overwhelmingly to join the new Confederacy. Support for secession was almost unanimous among the white population along the Alabama border; Franklin County, today the home of the University of the South at Sewanee, even voted to secede from Tennessee and join the state of Alabama during the impatient months before Tennessee’s own secession vote. Though voters in many Tennessee River counties in West Tennessee expressed doubts about secession – the river flows north at that point – the statewide vote was never in doubt.

In part because of such reticence, Tennessee was the last state to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. Indeed, its own secession ordinance, advocated by Governor Isham Harris and passed by the legislature on May 6, revealed just how contested the very notion of “secession” was in the minds of Tennesseans. “We, the people of the State of Tennessee, waiving any expression of opinion as to the abstract doctrine of secession, but asserting the right, as a free and independent people, to alter, reform, or abolish our form of government in such manner as we think proper,” the ordinance stated before declaring relations with the Federal government null and void. Secessionists knew that even the most ardent Unionists would accept language affirming the right of a people to “abolish our form of government,” as the Revolutionary generation had done in 1776.

Unionism had been persistent across the state throughout the secession crisis. And after Lincoln’s troop call-up in April 1861, the legislature still needed to tread carefully on the constitutional question of secession because most political leaders in the East remained unconvinced of the need to join the new Southern Republic.

Some voters in East Tennessee supported secession too, especially those living in railroad towns like Bristol, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. But most East Tennesseans resented those latter-day secessionists and despised the dominant planter class in the rest of the state.

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No politicians symbolized this spirit better than Senator Andrew Johnson, who refused to yield his seat in Congress after secession, and a vituperative Knoxville editor – and later governor and senator – named William “Parson” Brownlow. Johnson, as defender of the class interests of the non-slaveholding masses of East Tennessee, warned that “it is not the free men of the north that [secessionists] are fearing most but the free men South.” In a letter to a former newspaper subscriber, the colorful Brownlow wrote that secession was based in “falsehood, fraud, and perjury” and affirmed, “I think it the most natural thing in the world for a nation to fight for its Government against a vile rebellion which has never yet been able to allege an excuse.”

What explains East Tennessee’s persistent Unionism? The loss of political power to the rest of the state clearly grated on the region’s frustrated citizens. But more important was the relative unimportance of slavery. To be sure, nearly all white East Tennesseans supported the institution of slavery in 1860 – Parson Brownlow famously defended the peculiar institution in an 1858 debate with a Connecticut abolitionist, while Andrew Johnson owned slaves at his Greeneville home. But a deep heritage of antislavery activity in the region suggests, at the very least, ambivalence about the institution not present elsewhere in the South.

In fact, before the abolitionist movement took hold in Massachusetts in the 1830s, local activists like Elihu Embree preached the end of slavery to mountain communities near the North Carolina border. The Tennessee Manumission Society boasted support from nearly all East Tennessee counties, making it one of the strongest abolitionist organizations in America before 1830. And Benjamin Lundy established one of the first great abolitionist newspapers in Greeneville before he headed for Baltimore, where a young William Lloyd Garrison became one of his top disciples.

Blount County, just south of Knoxville and Knox County, typified the region’s ambivalence toward slavery. One of the most influential early residents of Maryville, the county’s largest city, was Isaac Anderson, who founded the Presbyterian Southern and Western Theological Seminary to serve the legions of Scots-Irish migrants settling in the region from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. One of Anderson’s first students was a slave he purchased in the Blount County courthouse in 1816. Immediately freed, this student, named George Erskine, received his training for the Presbyterian ministry and then headed off for Liberia. Anderson would continue to preach an antislavery gospel in the Presbyterian church and as head of Maryville College, which he founded in 1819. Meanwhile, a local Quaker community in nearby Friendsville served a robust branch of the Underground Railroad that funneled runaway slaves through the Great Smoky Mountains.

But Blount County was not entirely abolitionist. Indeed, by 1860, 10 percent of the county was enslaved – enough for most of the population to support the institution’s continued existence, though not large enough for most voters to privilege defense of slavery over perseverance of the Union. Like other Upper South conservative Unionists, Blount Countians believed the Union was the best protector of slavery and the social order; voters in the county gave 81 percent support for the Union.

The same was true across the region. Smoky and Cumberland Mountain counties like Sevier and Scott cast more than 95 percent of their vote for the Union. Scott County, in a perfect inversion of Franklin, even voted to separate from Tennessee following a visit to the county seat by Andrew Johnson; the county, renamed the Free and Independent State of Scott, would not request formal readmission to Tennessee until 1986.

Once statewide secession was a fact, many East Tennesseans settled on a new strategy: throw off the yoke of planter hegemony once and for all by creating a new state of East Tennessee. Not everyone agreed, though, and the result was a vicious guerrilla war that tore families and communities apart, fueling local tensions for decades after the Civil War ended.

The legacy of East Tennessee’s Unionism is remarkably strong. Lincoln Memorial University, named after the fallen president, was founded in Harrogate, Tenn. in 1897. And thanks in part to Parson Brownlow’s violent expulsion of Confederate sympathizers after 1863, the region became a postwar Republican Party stronghold. Even at the height of the “Solid South” of the early 20th century, when voting Republican was considered practically a mortal sin in the rest of the South, East Tennesseans refused to vote Democratic — Tennessee’s Second Congressional District, based in Knox and Blount Counties, has not elected a Democrat since 1852.

Aaron Astor is an assistant professor of history at Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri.”

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